Wireless communication networks serve wireless User Equipment (UE) with mobile data services like voice calling and internet access. The wireless data networks have wireless access points that exchange data signals over the air with the wireless UEs. The wireless access points exchange this data with network elements. The network elements exchange the data with various systems like the internet and media servers. Popular forms of wireless networking are Fifth Generation New Radio (5GNR) and Long Term Evolution (LTE).
The wireless communication networks use radios to transfer and receive wireless data signals. The radios each have multiple antennas that form an antenna array. The radios use Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) to control which antennas that a given data signal traverses through their antenna array. The radios also use beamforming to focus data signal energy on targeted UEs. Beamforming controls the power and phase of each data signal at each transmitting antenna in the array.
In the wireless communication networks, the radios use Multiple User MIMO (MU-MIMO) to transfer wireless signals to multiple UEs using the same shared time and frequency. By using MU-MIMO with beamforming, each of the different data signals has a different combination of transmit powers and phases across the antennas in the array. To enhance beamforming, the UEs in a given MU-MIMO group are selected to have geographically diverse angles or azimuths from one another from the perspective of the wireless access point.
The lower number of antennas among the MU-MIMO transmitter and the MU-MIMO receiver designates the MU-MIMO layer. Thus, a wireless access point with 64 antennas and a UE with four antennas has a MU-MIMO layer of four. The number of antennas in the UE typically sets the MU-MIMO layer. MU-MIMO UEs are grouped by their MU-MIMO layer and their geographic diversity. For example, UEs at MU-MIMO layer four that have geographically diverse locations would be grouped together to share time and frequency.
The UEs in the same MU-MIMO layer are allocated the same amount of transmit power from the wireless access point to the UE. For example, a wireless access point transmits data signals to all UEs at MU-MIMO layer four at the same transmit power. Unfortunately, the wireless access point does not effectively and efficiently control these transmit power allocations to optimize MU-MIMO.